We need to stop micromanaging what recipients buy with their food stamps. It would be hard to find someone outside the cocoon of Washington special interests who would defend our current welfare system. We spend nearly $1 trillion a year to fund over 100 separate anti-poverty programs, yet we have achieved only minimal gains in helping people escape poverty. By conventional measures, the poverty rate today is as high as when the War on Poverty was declared more than 50 years ago. Even alternative poverty measures that are arguably more accurate show few gains in recent years. We may have made poverty more comfortable, but we are not helping people become independent and self-sufficient. The need for reform is obvious.
The apostate author has done something of an about-face since her last book, in which she dismissed any reasonable hope that the Creed of the Sword might be reformed. Take away its supremacist worldview, as she thinks might be possible, and it doesn’t leave much for reformed Muslims to pray for.
From Caged Virgin to Infidel to Nomad, Ayaan Hirsi Ali milked the memoir, which is fine because she has an important story to tell and it bears reiteration and elaboration. Now there is Heretic (Harper Collins, 2015, 272 pages), which continues the catchy one-word titles that Ann Coulter has made into an art form but which jumps genre. Heretic is not primarily a memoir; it is a structured call for reformation within Islam. It also represents a mind change.
In Nomad Hirsi Ali “believed that Islam was beyond reform, that perhaps the best thing for religious believers in Islam to do was to pick another god”. In Heretic she not only calls for reform but believes in its feasibility and possibility. While I think she was right in Nomad – as I will explain – that doesn’t take away from the instructive value of Heretic; for non-Muslims and, perhaps, even more so for Muslims prepared to be seen reading it.
“It simply will not do for Muslims to claim their religion has been ‘hijacked’ by extremists. The killers of IS and Boko Haram cite the same religious texts that every other Muslim in the world considers sacrosanct.”
Awarded Hillary Clinton ‘Liberty Medal’ on the Eve of 1st Anniversary of Benghazi Attack
At a gala ceremony in Philadelphia on September 10, 2013, former Governor Jeb Bush honored former Sec. of State Hillary Clinton with the prestigious Liberty Medal on behalf of the National Constitution Center. The medal was presented ”in recognition of her lifelong career in public service and for her ongoing advocacy efforts on behalf of women and girls around the globe.”
Said the National Constitution Center chairman, Governor Jeb Bush:
Former Secretary Clinton has dedicated her life to serving and engaging people across the world in democracy. These efforts as a citizen, an activist, and a leader have earned Secretary Clinton this year’s Liberty Medal.
At the time, conservatives were taken aback that Clinton would be so honored almost a year to the date of the terrorist attacks on U.S. facilities in Benghazi, Libya, that left four Americans dead. One conservative group released an online video at the time proclaiming Jeb Bush “unelectable” to the presidency for having presented the prestigious award.
Days after Iran deal, Pentagon acts fearing nuclear missile attack that would burn out America’s electronic-based defenses.
The Pentagon has decided to reopen the Cheyenne Mountain Air Defense facility, which housed the heart of America’s air and missile defense of North America. The facility had been mothballed in a “cost-saving” move in 2006.
Last week, Admiral William Gortney, head of US NORAD (North American Aerospace Defense Command) and US Northern Command, reversed that decision and announced the Pentagon was spending an opening ante of $700 million to oversee reactivation of the Cheyenne mountain-embedded facility.
The reason – the Pentagon’s fears of a nuclear Electro-Magnetic Pulse (EMP) attack by a missile that would burn out America’s overly-dependent defense, which is based on modern electronics.
US NORAD and US Northern Command aren’t just acronyms. They represent the last-ditch American defense of the continental United States homeland. NORAD originally stood for North America Air Defense Command, but now stands for North American Aerospace Command. US Northern Command is the area-specific designation of the US military command that is responsible for the continental United States homeland.
Why has no one read it?
In a dark Yiddish masterpiece that predated the Holocaust by two decades, the poet Uri Zvi Greenberg envisioned the annihilation of Jewish life in Europe. Today, seven decades after that vision became cataclysmic reality, as Jews this week observe the annual commemoration of the Holocaust on Yom Hashoah, and as the Jewish horizon in Europe darkens once again, his work speaks with fresh immediacy.
Greenberg (1896-1981) was not only one of Yiddish literature’s foremost modernists but arguably the greatest Hebrew poet of the last hundred years. If his name is unfamiliar today, that is because he inhabits a strange kind of cultural quarantine. Literary critics in Israel acknowledge his titanic stature, yet in a country that pays high honor to its writers, he has never been part of Israel’s school curriculum, and you won’t find him among the quartet of 20th-century Hebrew poets whose faces were recently added to Israeli banknotes. Nor is much of his work—including In malkhes fun tseylem (“In the Crucifix Kingdom”), which I offer here for the first time in English translation—available in English.
Obama is the most dangerous president in history. He lied when promising the world that the U.S. would never allow Iran’s war fanatics to have nuclear weapons. While Obama was demagogically repeating, “Never! Never!,” his alter ego Val Jarrett carried on secret talks with the mullahs, resulting in today’s total surrender. Today we have a fuzzy “framework” (that Iran denies even agreeing to), which gives the world thirteen years before the mullahs can set off Armageddon. After thirteen years, all bets are off, assuming the enemy doesn’t violate its “promises” tomorrow, which it has a long history of doing.
This is not sane.
If you drive through California’s Central Valley, you will see, along both sides of the ribbon of highway, acres of scorched earth. The arid land goes on in some places as far as the eye can see. This land was once rich in fruits, nuts, and vegetables. Now it is a wasteland, a seemingly endless expanse of brown, dry, and barren earth.
Periodically you will see a billboard, welcoming you to the manmade California desert, which displays mocking appreciation for some of our more notable Democratic elected officials who have helped in this creation.
President Obama continued his so far unrequited courtship of Fidel and Raúl Castro on Tuesday by removing Cuba from the U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism.
The decision, following Mr. Obama’s weekend meeting with Raúl in Panama, certifies that Cuba had provided no support for international terrorism for the past six months. The certification adds that “the Government of Cuba has provided assurances that it will not support acts of international terrorism in the future.” Well, that’s certainly reassuring.
Rising extremism in Hungary is one of the most alarming political developments in Europe. The latest sign came Sunday when voters in the country’s western Tapolca district elected a candidate from the far-right Jobbik party in a special vote. If the result is officially confirmed, it will be the first time Jobbik has won a parliamentary seat in a by-election rather than through party lists.
Jobbik is the third most powerful party in Hungary. In last year’s general election, it garnered 20% of ballots. The party is openly anti-Semitic. A Jobbik leader in 2012 called on the government to “tally up people of Jewish ancestry” since they “pose a national security risk.” A Jobbik member of Parliament has spat on a Budapest Holocaust memorial.
A new index to chart the gap between political words and deeds.
Just in time for Wednesday’s nationwide walk-out by fast-food workers to demand a higher minimum wage, Hillary Clinton emailed supporters this week to complain about pay differentials in American business. According to Reuters, Mrs. Clinton griped that “the average CEO makes about 300 times what the average worker makes.”
Many of these CEOs can only wish they were rewarded for their time as handsomely as Mrs. Clinton is. The expected 2016 Democratic presidential nominee has been paid as much as $300,000 per speech.
